bashing a file date into a variable

I've written a bash script to read the contents of a file and email it to me. I'd like to change the subject so that it includes the file modification date.

It looks like I should be using stat to do that, and while man stat works stat doesn't seem to actually be there



Is this me falling into the depths of newbie-hell and missing something obvious or does stat not exist?

Sarah

hello sarah
stat is a c-lib function, you cannot use it on cmd line
sure you can write an onw 'stat'cmd, for this you need
C knowledge, or use the 'test' cmd, read man pages.
mybe you are seeking for 'file' to get the type of file,
i dont know yous OS
i also dont understand what you are trying to do

I'm using bash to analyse a file with the output going to a log file. I'm them emailing that log file to myself. Because I might do that every day I want the emails to have the time in the subject so that I can find the one I want more easily. I know the email has a timestamp too but I'm just wanting to have the date in the subject.

The box is an old Unix server.

If this was PHP it'd be done in a flash, but bash scipting doesn't seem to have that type of functionality.

thanks

Sarah

The "stat" tool doesn't seem to be installed on your server. In Linux, it's part of the "coreutils" package.

You can get the current date+time with this, if this helps:

Or you can use "ls -l filename" to get the modification time of a file too.

guggach:
My FreeBSD, NetBSD and Linux installations all come with a command line tool stat(1)... but surprisingly (at least to me), Darwin doesn't have one either

M.

Thanks, I'll keep hunting. The file date is not necessarily the run date.